Top Ten Modern Architects

Top 10 Modern Architects Who are the greatest modern architects of the 20th century? First, we must ask, what makes a great architect? Is it how many buildings they designed, or how creative they are? Or is it how they responded to the design problems of their age, and what influence did they have on other architects and the world at large? In other words, did their designs address the issues of their age? Architecture is the will of the epoch translated into space, Mies van der Rohe. The core problem for architects of the 20th century was the ordering of society around the idea of industrial production. In the past, architects focused on the craft of a master mason, or the master carpenter. In the industrial age, this craft was abandoned and replaced with mass production. What forms were best for communicating this new organization in society? Should we design all buildings to look like factories, and all housing to look like factory worker housing? An architect must be a prophet. A prophet in the truest sense of the term. If you can't see at least 10 years ahead, don't call him an architect. Frank Lloyd Wright. The second problem of the 20th century was new technology. How should architects incorporate new scientific breakthroughs into architecture? Electric lighting, HVAC, and structural design were all new to architecture. Walter Gropius said, We want an architecture adapted to our world of machines, radios, and fast cars, with the increasing strength of new materials, steel, concrete, glass, and with a new audacity of engineering, the ponderousness of old methods of building is giving way to a new lightness and airiness. The third problem to be solved was one of new industrial materials, glass, steel, concrete, and aluminum being the most important. The fourth problem was to develop a new modern concept of space. How do architects represent the fast space of an automobile, a train, or an airplane? Architects responded by creating interlocking spaces, hovering volumes, and interpenetrating planes. But who are the greatest modern architects? Let's start. Number 10. Walter Gropius The Bauhaus believes the machine to be our modern medium of design and seeks to come to terms with it. Modern architecture as we know it in the 20th century came to fruition in 1920s Germany. It was a reaction to mass industrial production and was based on radical workers groups. The mood in Germany was a juxtaposition of angst and despair with hope for a utopian future. In this context, Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus in 1919. Its aim was to fuse art and craft using new industrial processes and technocratic ideals. At this point, architects were learning how to integrate new technologies of mass production, glass, and steel to create a new visual language of forms. Gropius had students design for mass production and seek to express these new values of mechanization. Gropius had a huge effect on architects such as Paul Rudolph, I.M. Pei, and Philip Johnson. The Bauhaus has had a huge effect on culture from mass-produced multifamily housing to a Kia. Number 9. SOM SOM isn't a specific architect, but an architectural firm of many architects. It started as Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill. At one point, it was the most important architecture firm in the world. They're on this list because they had one of the most important roles in developing modern architecture. Specifically, they designed the modern form of the skyscraper and some of the tallest buildings in the world to include the John Hancock Center, the Willis Tower, One World Trade Center, and the Burj Khalifa. The John Hancock Center of Chicago of the 1970s was designed by Bruce Graham of SOM. They took the Miesian formula and modified it to be diagonal brace tubes. This cross-bracing dealt with the lateral wind forces. SOM developed a standardized big business version of Mies van der Rohe's technological purity. The steel frame, tinted glass, and refined finishes. They optimized American love for high technology and megastructures. The skyscraper was a central preoccupation of American architecture and symbolized capitalism's dominance over the world. They're the prototype architecture firm that integrates structural engineering, architecture, civil engineering, urban design, and interior design. The Burj Khalifa has been the tallest skyscraper in the world since it was built in 2010. The design is based on Islamic architecture of the region. The primary structure is reinforced concrete with some structural steel. It was designed to be a centerpiece of large-scale mixed-use development. Designed by David Childs of SOM, One World Trade Center is the tallest building in the United States and the seventh tallest building in the world. Carlo Scarpa is perhaps the most important architect you've never heard of. He wasn't known outside of Italy until the 1980s. Unlike other modern architects who wanted to tear down traditional architecture and replace it with modern abstract forms, Scarpa was deeply sensitive to existing context and tried to integrate new with the old. His architecture delighted in stratification, layering, and the dynamic interaction of planes. Frank Lloyd Wright was a primary influence on Scarpa. A central part of his practice was the restoration and reuse of old buildings. He developed a method of juxtaposing new with old fragments so that each was enhanced. The effect was to feel the passing through layers of time. What his work teaches us is modern architecture can integrate the old and the new into a seamless whole. Scarpa taught the existing context could be used to design a deeper and more profound form of modern architecture. Number 7 Pierluigi Nervi Pierluigi Nervi was an Italian engineer and architect. His structures illustrated the engineering principle of bringing structural loads down into the foundations with minimal use of materials. Nervi saw building structure as an art. He demonstrated how engineering and sculptural expression could be synthesized into a naturalistic expression of form and function. Nervi was intuitive in his methods of design, and his buildings seemed like descendants of grand structures of history. His numerous stadiums, factories, exhibition halls, and bridges demonstrated how engineering and sculptural expression can achieve a synthesis of form, giving an almost natural character. Agnelli Exhibition Hall, Turin Nervi used open precast concrete ribs with slender profiles, resulting from the imprint of diamond-shaped plans, to realize a shell vault. Gatti Wool Factory, Rome Slender columns and flared capitals were supported on a radiating network of two-way beams, which expressed the pattern of underlying stresses. Palazzo del Laverno For the Palazzo del Laverno, Nervi created an open space with a grid of freestanding columns, each supporting a square roof unit on splayed beams. The solution allowed for an entirely glazed perimeter and for strips of natural light between the square roof elements. Nervi is the direct inspiration for architects like Santiago Calatrava. 6. Philip Johnson Architecture is how to waste space. In 1932, Johnson, along with Henry Russell Hitchcock, wrote the book International Style Architecture since 1922. This did several things. It changed modernism from a technique and process of design into a style. This was a lie as modern architecture up until this point was not a style. Le Corbusier said styles are a lie. Philip Johnson, in disagreeing with Le Corbusier, turned modernism on its head. Secondly, it turned German architecture of the Bauhaus into an international style. These two lies together created a new vision for modern architecture as an international style. Philip Johnson was perhaps the first openly gay architect in history, coming out publicly in 1993. He was a great cheerleader for architects of his time. He helped bring Mies van der Rohe to the United States and designed the Seagrams building with him in 1954. He was the first director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and brought Gropius and Le Corbusier. In 1932, he organized the first exhibit of modern architecture. He was also the first to have a show on industrial design and can be said to have brought this art from the Bauhaus to the United States. Philip Johnson invented the term postmodern architecture or was the first to use it widely. He was a great promoter of other postmodern architects such as Robert Venturi, Frank Gehry, and Michael Graves. Number five, Frank Gehry People ask me if I'm an artist or an architect, but I think they're the same. Frank Gehry is a Los Angeles-based architect. He's considered a postmodern architect. Gehry said, I think the biggest problem of industrial architecture is that it loses its sense of humanity. Minimalist stuff drains all the humanity out of it. The idea works great for the money thing, but it doesn't work well for the feeling thing. Gehry's most famous building is the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. It was so successful it created the Bilbao effect, which is a term coined to express how an iconic piece of architecture could revitalize the tourism and rebuild the economy of the city. Cities around the world hired architects to design large-scale eye-catching architectural commissions for good or for bad. Louis Kahn Architecture is the thoughtful making of space. Kahn achieved an integration of the modern and the ancient. He was a master of monumentality. His deep humanism enabled him to avoid mere shape-making of formalists. He knew how to fuse together modern construction with traditional forms and methods. Kahn's method used the parti diagram as the main generating idea of a composition. This comes from the Beaux-Arcs system. Kahn said, You say to a brick, What do you want, brick? And the brick says to you, I like an arch. And you say to the brick, Look, I want one too, but arches are expensive, and I can use a concrete lintel. And then you say, What do you think of that brick? And the brick says, I'd like an arch. Kahn said, I would say that architecture is a thoughtful making of spaces. It is not filling prescriptions as clients want them filled. It is not fitting uses into dimensional areas. The architect's first act is to take the program that comes to him and change it. Not to satisfy it, but to put it in the realm of architecture. Which is to put it in the realm of spaces. Number three. Frank Lloyd Wright. Study nature. Love nature. Stay close to nature. It will never fail you. Frank Lloyd Wright is often misunderstood as an architect. Some see Wright as a traditionalist with American values of individualism, naturalism, and democratic ideals. He is backward looking, coming from the American arts and crafts movement. Some see Wright as a precursor to modernism with modern universal interpretations of spaces and abstract massings. These ideas always compare Wright to the broader history of architecture. Both these interpretations of Wright are misleading. He was, in fact, a singular architect with his own style and worldview and does not fit easily into the history of architecture. The best way to understand Wright is his continuation of the ideas of Louis Sullivan, his mentor, and the development of his architecture into a purely individual and unique modern style. Most of Wright's ideas on organic architecture, ornamental design, and nature come from Sullivan. But he also added classical architectural ideas. But unlike Sullivan, Wright transformed space in a modern way by manipulating volumes of rooms and spaces. Wright designed space like music, where rhythm, movement, repetition, and variation of elements was key. Like other modern architects, Wright was concerned with integrating arts and crafts and new machine-age technologies. The Robie House The Robie House is the clearest expression of the prairie house ideal. The prairie house was a set of principles or archetypal elements that set up the psychology of the home. These would include the hearth as the center of the home, the plinth as a base, the roof as a tent-like structure, and walls and columns for enclosure. Unity Temple Unity Temple was an exercise in first principles for Wright. Wright's American influence was considerable, especially among his midwestern followers of the prairie school. In Europe, his works were mostly known through photos and drawings, and thus a mythological version of Wright was created in architects' minds. Two of Wright's students were from Vienna, Rudolf Schindler and Richard Nuttura, and after studying at his attler, went on to be renowned modern architects themselves. Number 2 Mies van der Rohe Less is more Barcelona Pavilion International Exhibition in Barcelona 1929 Mies van der Rohe was a German architect who moved to the United States and who developed a rectilinear style based on poetic accentuations of structure and technology. His skyscrapers were rationalist constructions, where he strips down the building to its essential structure, then wraps it with a curtain wall of glass, creating a minimalistic solution. This is a dematerialization of building structure and would become the international style. He created a utopian vision for an industrial future. The skyscraper becomes the cathedral of modernity, an expression of culture's highest aspirations. The irony is that this utopian vision of the future became the boring symbol of capitalism. Crown Hall, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago 1950 Crown Hall was the image of a factory with vast universal space. It used a dramatic truss system that created structural clarity while celebrating American steel craftsmanship. The glass box was space good for everything. The symmetry, proportion, and clear expression of load and support were a modern interpretation of neoclassical architecture. Mies, it may be argued, is the most copied modern architect. Philip Johnson's Glass House is a direct copy of Mies' Farnsworth House, and SOM made a career of copying Mies' style exactly in their skyscraper designs. Number 1 Le Corbusier Architecture is the masterly, correct, and magnificent play of masses brought together in light. Le Corbusier was a painter, architect, writer, and theorist born in Switzerland. He is arguably the most influential architect of the 20th century. Le Corbusier was increasingly interested in reinforced concrete and the use of this material in context of industrialization. This allowed for large, uninterrupted spaces on the interior. Imitators of Le Corbusier took this idea and created brutalism, which used rough concrete as the primary building material. A house is a machine for living in. The idea of mass production housing was as important as the fact. The idea was a house whose function had been examined from the ground floor up and stripped to their essentials. This promised a new life where people could look out past pure white walls to the essential joys of light, space, and greenery. His book Towards a New Architecture is a manifesto of modern architecture. It has been one of the most influential architectural books of the 20th century. It argues to throw away old forms and ways of doing architecture and embrace mass production in the machine. His ideas coalesced into five points of modern architecture. This was a vocabulary of architectural forms based on reinforced concrete construction. They were The Pilote This was a central element from which all others evolved. It allowed the building to be lifted off the ground. Ribbon windows Often this meant horizontal strip windows running the full length of the building. A free plan With pilotes supporting the weight of the building, the interior and the exterior walls freely move anywhere based on the functional demand. Free facade The free facade allowed for all windows or curtain wall or any sort of openings based on functional requirements. Terraced gardens on the roof Concrete allowed for the roof to be a structural member that could support greenery and become an exterior space to take in earth and sky. Villa Savoy We can see all these elements come together in the Villa Savoy. The Villa Savoy had pilotes that elevated the main floor up to the second level to create a piano nobile. By using pilotes, the exterior walls were not structural and the windows could be placed anywhere. Pilotes also allowed for a free plan as no structural walls were required. This allowed for a free facade creating windows or brise soleil which were sunscreens. Finally, the roof could be flat and a terraced garden could be placed there. Le Corbusier painted daily and his abstract cubist-like paintings, which he called purist, gave him a rich vocabulary of forms for his late architecture. Ronchamp Ronchamp is perhaps the most singular masterpiece of Le Corbusier. Like Picasso, he focused his ideas on primitive forms and ancient associations. There is a tension between modernism and primitive forms. Le Corbusier is perhaps the second most copied architect after Mies van der Rohe. Stephen Hall, for example, has made a career from copying Le Corbusier. His Saint Ignatius Chapel is a thematic copy of Le Corbusier's Ronchamp. Did you agree with the list of top 10 architects? Who's your favorite modern architect? Leave your own list in the comments below. If you liked this video, please like and subscribe. If you'd like to support this channel, please go to Redbubble and buy a t-shirt or sticker.